This film is talked about a fair bit in books on Roger Corman so I was anxious to see it. It was made to cash in on the “past lives craze” inspired by the best seller Lives of Bridie Murphy; Charles Griffith originally wrote it in iambic pentameter but Corman apparently lost his nerve and ordered it translated into English. I’d love to read the original (ditto Griffith’s unfilmed script for The Golden Bug) but you can’t really blame him.
What’s left, though, is fascinating. It’s a full on, tough story – the heroine is a prostitute experimented on by a crazed shrink. She realises she’s the reincarnation of a woman burned at the stake as a witch. The modern day woman ends up trying to help the old woman avoid being burned at the stake. Bt this threatens new woman’s existence. So the shrink goes back in time to try and persuade the old woman to allow herself to be killed as a witch so the new woman can live. And she does – she offers up her head to be chopped off and everything. Now that’s genuinely clever – even more so than most Griffith scripts for Corman.
The female lead is poor but the magnificently proportioned Allison Hayes is excellent as a witch, and Mel Welles is fun as a gravedigger. There’s a midget; a dance number by the graveyard; a dull hero performance from Richard Garland (Corman never seemed that interested in conventional male heroes – he was a lot more comfortable with baddies or nerds); Hayes chops off someone's head for Satan; a witch has warts on her nose; a line up of people selling their soul to the devil (who actually carries a trident)
Corman later admitted that this and Saga of the Viking Women were films with big budget ideas made for a low budget – he advised if you want to make a low budget film, make a low budget idea. This is definitely a movie that needed a bit more time and money – a touch of the Poe treatment, in particular Dan Haller and Floyd Crosby. Many of the actors look silly and the art design isn’t what it needed. But its fascinating and another fine effort from one of the best screenwriters of the 50s and 60s.
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